At the time of Billy Budd's arbitrary enlistment
into the Indomitable that ship was on her way to join the Mediterranean fleet . No long time elapsed
before the 'unction was effected. As one of that fleet the seventy-four
participated in its movements, tho' at times, on account of her superior
sailing qualities, in the absence of frigates
, despatched on separate duty as a scout and at times on
less temporary service. But with all this the story has little concernment, restricted as it is to the
inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor.

It was the summer of
1797. In the April of that year had occurred the commotion at Spithead followed in May by a second and yet more
serious outbreak in the fleet at the Nore. The
latter is known, and without exaggeration in the epithet, as the Great
Mutiny. It was indeed a demonstration more menacing to England than the
contemporary manifestoes and conquering and proselyting armies of the
French Directory .

To the Empire, the Nore Mutiny was what a
strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson.
In a crisis when the kingdom might well have anticipated the famous signal
that some years later published along the naval line of battle what it was
that upon occasion England expected of Englishmen; that was the time when
at the mast-heads of the three-deckers and seventy-fours moored in her own
roadstead- a fleet, the right arm of a Power then all but the sole free
conservative one of the Old World, the blue-jackets
, to be numbered by thousands, ran
up with huzzahs the British colors with the union and cross wiped out; by that cancellation
transmuting the flag of founded law and freedom defined, into the enemy's red meteor of unbridled
and unbounded revolt. Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had
been ignited into irrational combustion, as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in
flames.

The event converted into irony for a time those
spirited strains of Dibdin - as a song-writer no mean
auxiliary to the English Government at the European conjuncture- strains celebrating, among other
things, the patriotic devotion of the British tar --

Such an episode in the Island's grand naval story
her naval historians naturally abridge; one of them (G.P.R. James
) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not "impartiality
forbid fastidiousness." And yet his mention is less a narration than a reference, having to do hardly
at all with details. Nor are these readily to be found in the libraries. Like some other events in
every age befalling states everywhere, including America, the Great Mutiny was of such character
that national pride along with views of policy would fain shade it off into the historical background.
Such events can not be ignored, but there is a considerate way of historically treating them. If a
well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation
in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.

Though after parleyings between Government and the ringleaders, and concessions by the former
as to some glaring abuses, the first uprising- that at Spithead- with difficulty was put down, or
matters for the time pacified; yet at the Nore the unforeseen renewal of insurrection on a yet larger
scale, and emphasized in the conferences that ensued by demands deemed by the authorities not
only inadmissible but aggressively insolent, indicated- if the Red Flag did not sufficiently do so-
what was the spirit animating the men. Final suppression, however, there was; but only made
possible perhaps by the unswerving loyalty of the marine corps and voluntary resumption of
loyalty among influential sections of the crews. To some extent the Nore Mutiny may be regarded as analogous to the distempering irruption of
contagious fever in a frame constitutionally sound, and which anon throws it off.

At all events, of these thousands of mutineers were some of the tars who not so very long
afterwards- whether wholly prompted thereto by patriotism, or pugnacious instinct, or by
both,- helped to win a coronet for Nelson at
the Nile, and the naval crown of crowns for him at Trafalgar. To the
mutineers those battles, and especiallyTrafalgar
, were a plenary absolution and
a grand one: For all that goes to make up scenic naval display, heroic magnificence in arms, those
battles, especially Trafalgar, stand unmatched in human annals.